Cardinal’s long goodbye
For the past four years, Billy Campbell, Karine Vanasse and an army of others brought North Bay to the world. Long after their departure, the police drama’s final season arrives Monday
Inside a nondescript office building in downtown North Bay, something that hundreds of people have devoted four years or more of their lives to is coming to an end.
It’s April 5, 2019, the final shooting day in this northern Ontario city for the crime drama “Cardinal.”
No one is dwelling on that fact as they set up and shoot, over and over, a scene of detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme, played by Billy Campbell and Karine Vanasse, walking up the stairs and into the office of the fictional Algonquin Bay police department. But crew members and visiting media stream in and out of the wardrobe room where everything other than the clothes on the actors’ backs is being sold off: $30 men’s suits! Women’s designer shoes for $10 a pair!
The mood on set is still buoyant from the previous weekend when Campbell and Vanasse won Canadian Screen Awards (the show itself took Best Limited Series and four other prizes earlier that same week). Their statuettes are proudly displayed atop a case full of faux police plaques and trophies.
The real goodbye for some of the cast and crew won’t come until the following week when the last footage is shot in a Toronto hotel. Campbell, a 60-year-old American actor known for everything from “Dynasty” and “Tales of the City” to “The Killing” and “The O.C.,” jokes that he has to get naked for one scene.
For people like director Nathan Morlando and executive producer Julia Sereny, the work will continue for months after that.
Chatting at the wrap party in the same
North Bay bar where Jerry O’Connell of “Carter” — another American headlining a Canadian-made show — has been known to sing karaoke, Morlando says the final season of “Cardinal” is being made twice: once in the shooting, once in the editing.
Sereny still remembers the first day of shooting “Cardinal” in 2016 in Sudbury.
“It was about minus 40. It was so cold that our sound recordist could not get his truck started. So we had no sound because we had to go and pick him up from afar,” she says. “When we tried to affix something — I can’t remember what it was — to a camera car, the windows shattered because it was so cold … Welcome to the North.”
As she relates this story, it’s not that cold in North Bay, a relatively balmy 3 C, but there have been days when the temperature for outdoor shoots this season dipped to -20 and below.
Cold or not, that environment has been one of the signatures of “Cardinal” — its landscapes, whether in summer, fall or winter, almost another character in the show.
“North Bay is gorgeous,” says Sereny of the city where Giles Blunt, author of the source material, the “John Cardinal” detective novels, grew up.
That setting is partly why she and Jennifer Kawaja, her producing partner in Sienna Films, fell in love with “Cardinal” as a TV project.
Plus, “the world that was created just felt very true and real, with complicated characters who live in a grey zone, who don’t always do the right thing but aspire to,” she says.
“I really have to hand it to CTV for having the vision and the courage to develop and make the show with us.” Courage? Well, Canadian broadcasters, when they’re not spending their money on the U.S. imports that viewers here lap up, have tended to gravitate to more traditional police and medical procedurals.
But the stars aligned to get a serialized drama with sometimes-difficult characters set in a small Ontario town made by a major Canadian network.
Billy Campbell and Karine Vanasse are the heart and soul of “Cardinal.”
As Cardinal and Delorme — he, a veteran detective prone to brooding; she, an ambitious homicide newbie who doesn’t suffer fools — their journey from wary distrust to unwavering reliance on each other has been just as compelling to watch as any of the murders they solve.
When Campbell won his second Canadian Screen Award for the part last March he thanked author Blunt for creating “probably what will be the best role of my life.”
As I sit with him in the makebelieve Algonquin Bay police boardroom, he doubles down on the statement — but he knew “Cardinal” was special from the moment he laid eyes on the script.
“I could see myself in the role immediately,” he says. And it’s a role he has never tired of playing, particularly this season, which is more focused than ever on the relationship between Cardinal and Delorme.
Campbell feels the show is going out on a high note (the fourth and final season begins April 6). But that doesn’t change how much he’ll miss working with everyone on the show — Vanasse more than anyone.
In a separate interview, Vanasse, a 36-year-old French Canadian who has primarily worked in Quebec as well as U.S. TV shows like “Revenge” and the short-lived “Pan Am,” says she and Campbell “trust each other fully.”
Their rapport is about “the heart being open: to the character, to the crew, to what this is. It’s what do we want to share with each other and with the audience? What part of you do you want to reveal?”
She and Campbell feel “safe” making those revelations with each other, she says.
When she cried as Campbell praised her at the 2019 Canadian Screen Awards, it was about “a beautiful moment between Billy and I,” but also her pride in making a strong Canadian show after years of working in the U.S.
“It was just a confirmation that you should say yes to the projects that really speak to you.”
I am sitting in a small room in downtown Toronto in July 2019 with director Morlando, executive producer Kawaja, a publicist and a couple of editors. The network has an issue with a dream sequence involving Cardinal, which we’ve just watched on a monitor.
The books on the table in his nightmare look too much like Bibles, they say. What to do? Digitally remove them? Alter them somehow? How about changing the colour of the covers from black, I suggest. They agree to try it.
When I see the scene again eight months later, the book covers are brown. So I have made an infinitesimal contribution to Season 4.
Mind you, the editing room is where you’re supposed to sweat the small stuff. Kawaja says post-shooting production is where “everything either comes together or falls apart.”
Among the details being pored over this particular day are whether too many fractions of a second elapse between a villain pulling a trigger and a character ducking; whether the gun in a character’s waistband is obvious enough in a scene; and whether a shot of another character walking to an ambulance has her starting on the correct foot.
These all might seem like minutiae, but “Cardinal” is a show that is felt most deeply in its small, quiet moments: glances, the pauses between words.
It’s the editors, as well as the writers, “who let those little moments in,” says Zach Smadu, who plays Detective Kular. “We’ve been shooting this one scene from countless angles and you never know what’s gonna be in it, but they choose that little moment when somebody looks over.”
That attention to detail continues in a different Toronto editing suite in September 2019, where a different group of professionals gathers to make final adjustments to the sound.
So, for instance, the screech of a bird is synced more closely with a gunshot; wind noises are diminished as a coroner examines a body outdoors; music is cut completely out of one scene to heighten the tension between two characters, but in another the music is amplified to signal how dangerous a person is. And on the tweaking goes.
A link to the finished episodes landed in my inbox a couple of weeks ago. They are taut and propulsive, and the North Bay winter plays a starring role in the crimes.
Last weekend was supposed to be a “Cardinal” minireunion. The show had 14 Canadian Screen Award nominations this year, including Best Drama Series, and Best Lead Actor and Actress in a Drama for Campbell and Vanasse.
For me, it would have been a full-circle moment, a chance to catch up almost a full year later with the people who graciously let me into their world that weekend in North Bay. But the March 29 awards gala was cancelled, along with every other large gathering amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
Assuming we ever get back to something approaching normal, the 2020 awards may someday be handed out and “Cardinal” will likely be nominated again for the 2021 ceremony.
The series itself will live on after its broadcast, on Crave in Canada and Hulu in the U.S., not to mention the more than 110 countries and territories that have bought the show worldwide.
For those who participated in its making, the memories will live on, too.
“I can’t think of a better experience,” Campbell said back in April 2019. “I’ve had some pretty darn pleasant experiences, but I can’t think of a better one.”